Vanity Fair: In the last scene of the series, you foreshadowed a lot of the discourse that’s happened online about your show. It felt like you were winking to the audience. Did you see any of the public’s reaction coming?
Jerrod Carmichael: One could guess [laughs]. The internet is a place of team sports. Everyone’s trying to score points for their team, and the show is at the intersection of a few teams…I could guess that showcasing uncomfortable truths would be a cause for conversation, and I’m thankful for those conversations. It is better than silence for the artist. For sure better than no one saying anything—that really would’ve hurt my feelings.
I think some of the vitriol and online discourse is about the fact that you’re in an interracial relationship and have a white boyfriend. Do you agree with that at all? If so, how is that affecting you?
Listen, everyone has a right to their opinion. I’ll say this, as far as my relationship: Do you know how impossible it is to find someone that you’re compatible with? To find someone who likes [the same] restaurants and art and culture? Someone you can go on vacation with—which destroys friendships? Someone that you can go to bed with—and I’m not even talking about sex? Someone that you’re compatible with next to at night? Someone who you get along with their family, you get along with their friends? They understand you, they see you. They don’t mind that I sometimes smack when I’m eating.
To find that person who I’ve found is so impossible. If you are hung up on race, then, hey, God bless. And I do hope—I don’t even mean this sarcastically, because sarcasm doesn’t play in print—I do hope that the people frustrated by that have found the person for them, because it’s hard. It is very, very hard.
You went on The Breakfast Club and called out Charlamagne for misrepresenting a joke you made about your boyfriend’s love of reading, facetiously likening the relationship to that of a slavemaster teaching a slave to read.
Listen, that was a difficult thing. So I ran into Kevin Hart at a party, and he said, “Never let them see you mad.” I said, “Well, what if you mad?” [Laughs] I don’t know. Be mad. I don’t mind showcasing the truth.
The idea of truth is so important to The Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show. You’re unafraid to be a villain. Was that authentic, or was that something you were doing for the camera? Does it matter either way?
None of it is me performing for the camera. Obviously, it’s a show and it’s edited and we’re following a story. But if I’m a villain, these are true things that I’m trying to work on. I’m a villain in therapy—if I am a villain. I’m just trying to explore things in my life that I need to fix.
I do think that people are so used to lies that it’s hard to take the truth. Typically, someone in my position makes the fluffy documentary, and it’s like, “It’s so hard being me. I try and try and I’m going to show me crying.” You have the right to make that, but that’s not what I was doing. I was saying, “Yeah, sometimes I’m wrong. and I need to work on that. I need to fix that. I acknowledge it.” And sometimes I’m in situations that are awkward or uncomfortable or embarrassing. All this is acknowledged with the show and by the show. That’s what I wanted to put out there.
